Paul Ramírez Jonas has created works over the last twenty-five years that range from large-scale public installations and monumental sculptures to intimate drawings, performances and videos. Through his practice he seeks to challenge the definitions of art and the public and to engineer active audience participation and exchange. In addition to conceiving public projects, both permanent (Taylor Square, Cambridge, MA, and Hudson River Park, New York City) and temporary (such as Talisman, 28th Bienal de São Paulo, 2008), Ramírez Jonas has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at venues including Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, Brazil; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK. His work has also been presented in major group exhibitions, most recently Under the Same Sun, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Residue of Memory, Aspen Art Museum. He has participated in the 1st Johannesburg Biennale; the 1st Seoul Biennial; the 6th Shanghai Biennial; the 28th São Paulo Biennial; the 53rd Venice Biennial, and the 7th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Delaney Nolan is a Pushcart Prize-winning Fulbright Fellow whose fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Tin House, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow and won the Academy of American Poets prize both years. In addition to a Pushcart, she is the recipient of a Sozopol fiction fellowship, Bread Loaf work-study scholarship, Vermont Studio Center residency, Stanley Graduate Award for international research, Skriduklaustur artist’s residency in Iceland, and more. Her fiction has been adapted into a radio play by NPR’s Snap Judgment; it has also been adapted into a short film by Emmy award winner Caitlyn Greene: AUGUST was screened at the Slamdance Film Festival, the New Orleans Film Festival, and elsewhere. Her work has been chosen as a notable for Best American Essays and translated into Arabic, Bulgarian, Italian, and Polish.

Jesse Sugarmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance, and sculpture. His work engages the automotive industry as a manufacturer of human identity, accessing automotive history as an index of both cultural identity and social development. Jesse has exhibited work in venues such as the Getty Institute, Los Angeles; el Museo Tamayo, Mexico; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; the Banff Center, Canada; Filmbase, Ireland; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Michael Strogoff, Marfa; el Museo de Arte Moderno de Santander, Spain; Drift Station, Omaha; Spirit Abuse, Albuquerque; the Knockdown Center, New York; Fugitive Projects, Nashville; the 21c Museum, Louisville; and High Desert Test Sites 2013. His work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art Papers, ART LTD, Art Cards, Art Fag City, Frieze Magazineand The New York Times. Jesse lives and works in Bakersfield, California.

Hui-Ying Tsai is a Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist based in New York producing two lines of work: self-exploratory (inward) and social engagement (outward). Her works have the storytelling quality that demonstrates dilemma swings between dystopian and utopian, reflecting on the symbolism of objects and artifacts holding cultural or historical significance. She comes from a family which values Taiwanese heritage with strong aesthetic practice in art and music. Her mother played an important rule of developing her love of literature. Her technical skills started from clay hand building, and later still life drawing, though the early conceptual and aesthetic development is self taught. Her academic fine arts training started from National Kaohsiung Normal University. When she became a licensed High School Art teacher in Taiwan, she wanted to push her art internationally. At the age of 24 she came to the US pursuing her MFA degree in San Francisco Art Institute majoring in New Genres. She has been exhibiting internationally in Taiwan, USA, Korea, and Ireland over a decade. A series of digital work was collected by National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 2010. The same year she also collaborated with the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and the San Francisco Arts Commission developed community based project.

Maureen Connor is a visual artist whose work combines elements of installation, video, design, human resources and social justice. Since 2000 she has been developing Personnel, a series of interventions concerned with the art institution as a workplace, which explore the attitudes, needs and desires of the staff at various institutions. Personnel and related projects have been produced for a diverse group of venues that include Periferic 8 Biennial for Contemporary Art, Romania, the Department of Art and Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008, Glyndor Gallery, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY, 2006; Wyspa Art Institute, Gdansk, Poland, 2004-7; Tapies Foundation, Barcelona, 2003; and the Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2001 among others. Currently she is working on an installation of Personnel for the Centre de Recherche en Droit Public, a think tank at the University of Montreal, as well as a book on Personnel to be published jointly by Wyspa Art Institute, Gdansk, Poland and Revolver Press, Frankfurt, Germany. Her work has been featured in venues such as the MAK, Vienna; Portikus, Frankfurt; ICA, Philadelphia; and the Whitney Biennial among many others. Her projects have received funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation for Artists and the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York in 1973 and has been Professor of Art at Queens College of the City University of New York since 1990.

Eugenia Manwelyan is a New York based choreographer, educator, and ecologist. She is the co-founder of Arts and Ecology, Director of Eco Practicum, member of Best Praxis art collective, and a founding faculty of School of Apocalypse. Her work is rooted in pedagogies of power, social choreography, and the connections between creative practice and survival. As a visiting faculty at Columbia University, Eugenia has worked on environmental planning and arts projects in the New York bioregion as well as India, Vietnam, and Jordan. Eugenia spearheaded a youth theater and peace-building project in Israel and Palestine that is now in its tenth year. She holds a BA in International Development from McGill University and her MS in Urban Planning from Columbia University. Eugenia engages in ongoing investigations into the powers of indigeneity to reorient civilization toward a new paradigm for survival.

Joseph Cuillier is native born New Orleanian and Harlem based artist, designer, and educator working in social practice, mixed media, digital art, printmaking, and poetry. Cuillier engages with language in public spaces where his text-based installations, publications, and performances juxtapose poetics on radical Black political thought with imagery that explores practical applications for abstraction. He received a MFA in Design from Pratt Institute in 2013. He is a faculty member at Parsons School of Design at The New School and the School of Art+Design at SUNY Purchase. Cuillier is a 2018 artist-in-residence and exhibitor at the New Museum. He was a 2016-2017 recipient of the A Blade Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, supporting his collaborative project: The Black School, a experimental art school combining art and radical Black politics. He is also the 2017 recipient The Laundromat Project Residency. He is part of the collection at the MoMA Library and the University of Virginia and has exhibited artwork and projects in Montreal, Canada, Portland, Oregon, Houston, Texas, Bronx, New York, Wallach Gallery at Columbia University, The Center for Book Arts, Pioneer Works, New Mexico Poetics Residency, and NY Art Book Fair at MoMa PS1.

Shani Peters is a multi-disciplinary artist based in New York City. Her practice encompasses community building, activism histories, and the creation of accessible imaginative experiences. Peters holds a B.A. from Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from the City College of New York. She has presented work in the U.S. and abroad at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem; Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in South Korea; and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare. Selected residencies include those hosted by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Laundromat Project, and Project Row Houses. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Rauschenberg Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Peters is a university and museum educator, focusing her teaching at the intersection of art and social change.

The Black School (TBS) was founded in 2016 by Joseph Cuillier and co-administered by Shani Peters as an experimental art school that uses a socially engaged proactive practice and Black history to educate Black/PoC students and allies on how to become radical agents of social and political change. Inspired by the Freedom Schools of “Freedom Summer” in 1964 and The Liberation Schools of The Black Panther Party, The Black School combines short workshops covering a range of art-making techniques, group discussions on radical Black political theory, and individual and collaborative projects that address the students community’s needs. Based in New York City, TBS is mobile in structure, currently traveling it’s programing to partnering schools and community organizations. TBS marked the end of its first year in summer 2017 with Black Love Fest, a one day art and music festival hosted at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum open to the community at large. The Black School’s residencies and fellowships include: A Blade of Grass (2016), The Laundromat Project (2017), and The New Museum (2018).